Print pricing

One of the stickier things that artists have to deal with is pricing their work, which is something that I have been avoiding for the better part of the year. But with the pending publication of my folio and that I need some funds to invest in some equipment, I have to come to grips with this.  Which is why I got sucked up into the pricing discussion with Paul Butzi.

One of the pricing problem, which is really a sales type issue, is that you have to tell someone the price and then you get either rejection (ouch!) or acceptance (yea!) or something in between.  Hard enough to figure what to photography, make a great print and then figure out what in your psyche drove you to create that image. Thus, the use of galleries, you let them decide the asking price for you and let them get the collector’s rejection.  And hopefully, they sometimes send money.  But I and probably most of us don’t have galleries to do the ‘heavy’ lifting for our sales.

So from our years of owning a custom picture framing store, I did come up with one rule of thumb.  I want my prints to be equal to or greater than the retail price of framing. I want someone to value my print more than they value the framing that is around it. Simple, eh?

So for a nice archival double-matte, regular glass and a nice stained wood frame to go around a 8-1/2 x 11″ printed rag, the retail price is going to be between $100 and $150.00 USD.  So for me, that is the ball park that I am working with for the Editioned folio, which will be printed on 8-1/2 x 11″ rag. 

As I check around, that $100-150 range is about the average lower-end price for archival prints for a mid-career artist as myself.  The average upper-end price for this size print is about $300 for a mid-career artist. 

So this is what I am muddling about as I prepare to announce my folio pricing.  One thing that I am also considering is to limit the availability of my prints in the 8-1/2 x 11″ size to only the Editioned folios.  Individual prints may be available only on the 13 x 19″ or 17 x 22″  rag or larger sizes.

Best regards, Doug

The first folio: Foundations, landscapes 1975 – 1985

As I contemplated an Editioned Folio as an alternative to my privately published book for Bad Trip – Sad Trip, it dawned on me that I have another option.

I have a number of images from my earlier landscape work, which dates between 1975 to 1985 that I have been thinking about lately. So why not make that my first folio? More about that soon, but I believe that I will name the body of work Foundations.

I think that a smaller 12 image project like this will be a better way to work out the Folio kinks versus a large series of 48 images like Bad Trip – Sad Trip.

And I realized that my web site and image files needed a Photoshop CS3 update and I wanted to give the folio images my current warm tone.

And now I need to think about e-commerce, probably PayPal, folio covers, pricing and all that good stuff;- )

Best regards, Doug

Opps! I forgot to state that this image, Icy Creek, Big Bear is one of 12 images that I am going to include in my Editioned folio Foundations.

ArtBiz101: Ending the Series

Entrance  (from the series  Insomnia: Hotel Noir)

I have decided to end my every Friday blog post ArtBiz101 series for a number of reasons.

First, I was finding that I was spending more time on researching the material for this series, which was taking away time from my own art projects. I had flirted with the idea that at the end of a year, packaging these posts together in a LuLu book.  But again, that would have also taken a lot of time. And what you soon find in life, is that time is very valuable. You are very limited in the time you have available, and I want to make the most of it!

Second, I did not anticipate or really want to make a “career” out of art marketing. There are some that have chosen that path, but I already have a nice day job career, I don’t need another one. I would rather spend my time on developing my creative vision and trying to better understand myself and sharing what I see.

So in the marketing parlance, I did a trial balloon with the ArtBiz101 series and it did not float! I did make one good connection on my Pricing article but I do not see that this series I wrote met a need. One nice thing about a blog is that there are statistics that give you feedback about what viewers read. The ArtBiz101 did not get many reads;- )

I am going to keep this series of articles active in my blog archives in the Art Market section for a while nevertheless.

Best regards, Doug

ArtBiz101 – Marketing Price

Drive Thru  (from the series: Insomnia: Hotel Noir)

Price is the fourth of the basic components while developing your Marketing Plan. And it may be the hardest part of your marketing program. Price can be further refined into two parts, Wholesale Price and Retail Price.

 Retail Price is probably the easiest to understand as we are constant bombarded in our daily lives with retail pricing and of course discounts to the retail price. Retail price is what the final collector will pay for your artwork. If your artwork is sold in a number of different markets and different prices, you may become aware of what is known as the Average Retail Price (ARP), which is usually less than the Listed Retail Price (LRP) due to discounts and other pricing differences. 

Wholesale Price on the other hand are those prices paid by all of the folks between you and the final collector, with the gallery representation the most common wholesale pricing for artists. Galleries usually negotiate their wholesale price as a percentage of the final selling price. There are some general rules of thumb for the galleries and their wholesale pricing, usually stated as a commission, which is your price to the gallery as a percentage of the final retail price, usually range from 40 – 60%. I have recently seen some on-line internet galleries asking for commissions from 20 – 30%. The key word is “asking”, as each gallery has its rules, but the rules are somewhat negotiable for each artist. An extremely well known and sought after artist will have better negotiation leverage than the unknown artist. 

Retail pricing is similar to the example above; higher prices will be paid to a well known artist than to an unknown artist who is becoming established. There are collectors who are also investors that they buy an artwork looking towards some appreciation to re-sell the artwork in a secondary art-market, such as a private dealer or perhaps at auction. If an artist is doing very well in the secondary art-market and their prices are steady increasing, there is less risk in buying that artwork. The investment in an unknown artist is just that for the secondary art-market, an unknown risk. 

If you are new at selling your artwork, finding the right price can be a challenge, where you don’t want to give your artwork away, but yet you have to have a reasonable enough price that someone will want buy something. There are a number of sources that can help you with finding comparable prices for comparable artist in their career. If you are represented by a gallery, they will have a very good insight as to what price they will need to ask. A golden rule of thumb is that you can always increase your price, but it is hard to lower your price without some perceived effect on you. 

Unlike the photo above with the competing gas stations on opposite corners displaying their respective prices, artists have a lot larger gray area in which their relative pricing is determined. 

Best regards, Doug

ArtBiz101 – Marketing Promotion

Hotel Signs (from the series Insomnia: Hotel Noir)

In discussing the marketing of your fine art, the Promotion is basically all those activities that take place to help sell your artwork. In a sense, every thing that you do to make a name for yourself or let potential buyers know about your art is promotion. Promotion is further refined into two types, Indirect Promotion and Direct Promotion.

Direct Promotion is probably the easiest to understand as we are constant bombarded in our daily lives with direction promotional activities, called advertising. Direction promotion includes billboards, television commercials, signs and the advertisements in newspapers and magazines. If you are paying for anything that promotes you or your artwork, that is direct promotion.

Indirect Promotion on the other hand is those events that occur that promote you that you are not paying for. There are some subtitles to the indirect promotion that you should be paying attention to, which I will discuss shortly.

A full page advertisement with your artwork displayed, perhaps a photo of you and your contact information in an art magazine is Direct promotion. You paid for it, you probably had a big say in the layout and the copy of this advertisement. You controlled this promotion. If that same magazine ran an article about your artwork, such as a gallery review or an editorial piece, also included your artwork, perhaps a photo of you and your contact information, that would be considered Indirect promotion. You may not have any say in what was finally written about you, even if you were interviewed by the writer. But your cost for the indirect promotion may be absolutely nothing (zip, zero, nada, nothing, something for nothing) other than taking time for the interview and preparation and sending digital files of the artwork that was illustrated in the article.

Both forms of promotion are important to an artist and their career. As a rule of thumb, you control the Direct Promotion, deciding who, what, where, how and when. For Indirect promotion, a lot more chance is involved in being written or discussed.

For your career, you need to keep a certain amount of visibility ongoing, and that you control with the Direct promotion, sometimes called an advertising campaign. This would include the simple things such as a web site, business cards, stationary, and if you have brick and mortar gallery, the signs out front and the phone directory  advertisements. To what extent you can maintain a direction promotion program depends on your budget to pay for this expense. If you are represented by a gallery, they may be coordinating a direct promotion program that might include you in the listing of artist or perhaps an image of your artwork. You may find that they may want to co-promote you where you buy an advertisement and you list your represented gallery(s) and they have pay for part of the expense. A lot of variations on this theme.

If you are on a tight budget (or even have a budget) then the Indirect promotion can look very appealing. Just as the song goes, it seems like you are getting something for nothing. There are also some very attractive aspects of Indirect promotion. It is one thing for your paid advertisement to state that you are the Great New Art Wonder, but it takes on a whole new meaning if one of the leading art critics in New York claims you are the Great New Art Wonder. This is called third party validation. You can’t pay an art critic to say good things about you or stop them from trashing you either. So collectors listen to the critic’s, editors, curators and others to see what they think.

Now that being said, there are also individuals and companies that can help you with Indirect promotion, call Public Relation (PR) firms. You pay for the services from the PR to help you with Indirect promotion and as they say, the results very. Good PR firms that work with artist know a lot of the editors, writers and others who are involved with art markets. They can help write the copy for an article about you, discuss it with various editors and help the article get placed. They are not responsible for how a magazine or newspaper will finally do with the information. PR firms can help you with connections that would take you a long time to make on your own, thus freeing you to work on your creative projects.

Last you are now reading my blog, which is free and it has my images and contact information. This blog is considered Indirect promotion. I am not advertising anything for sale, but providing some hopefully useful information. But I also hope that you look at the rest of this blog and get to know my art projects. And perhaps someday, you may want to add my artwork to your collection.

Finally, you do need a promotional program and you do need to spend some time thinking about how you are going to become known. I was always amazed that after having an art supply store in a mid size community, that after ten years of direct and indirect promotion, we would still have customers come in the door, claiming to have lived here almost all their lives and that they did not know we were here in town. It seems like you can never do enough.

Best regards, Doug

ArtBiz101 – Marketing: Place

In discussing the marketing of your fine art “products”, the Place is all those places where transactions take place, also called the “Channels of Distribution”. This not only includes where your collector buys your artwork, but all of those in between places where your artwork moves from you to the final sale.

Most products that you buy in a store, such as a food market, go through a number of in between locations call warehouses, perhaps operated by a wholesaler. For your artwork, you should have decided who will buy it, thus decide where is the place that is best for them to buy it at.

Traditionally artwork was either sold directly to the collector, but probably more commonly through a gallery or a private dealer. Today we would label a gallery which has a physical location as a “brick and mortar” place. In the Channel of Distribution, the private dealer was the wholesaler in the fine art market. They might buy from the artist and then to a collector or another gallery. They would also buy from a gallery some “excess inventory” to hold and then sell to another gallery. Yes, within the gallery channels of distribution, your artwork becomes “inventory”.

For photographers in the 1950’s, the place to exhibit and perhaps sell was on the walls of coffee shops and the rare venues were like those Stigliz had in New York. The first handful of commercial photography galleries started up in the 1960’s. Today, you can find photography exhibited with almost any other medium. Likewise, today, we have that relatively new channel of distribution, the internet, where artists can have their own on-line gallery and sell directly to the collector.

So the question remains, who is buying your artwork and where and how is the best way to make your artwork available? For established artist, this may not be as daunting of a question, but even then, they also wonder what the better approach is, such as exclusive representation or multiple gallery representations. For each potential channel of distribution, there are pros and cons that you have to consider. So a quick overview;

Direct sales; you as the artist sell your artwork directly to the collector. This can be accomplished with a web site, displaying at art fairs, buying display ads in fine art magazines and networking with friends, also called “word of mouth”. You could also establish your own “brick and mortar” gallery for your work in your city and perhaps represent others as well. One benefit to selling direct is you do not have to share the sale of your artwork with anyone, as galleries will take at least 50% of any sale as their commission.

There are a number of downside to direct sales, first is that you can spend a lot of time trying to sell your artwork when you could be creating more artwork. This can amount to 25% of your time and more. Selling direct may or may not connect you with established collectors and the chance that they find out about your work may be a bit random. There are also corporate buyers who create collections within large corporations that you may not have access to as they usually buy through galleries or dealers. Last, selling direct, you need to establish the infrastructure to help make the sales occur, such as the ability to accepting credit cards, although PayPal had made this task a little simpler.

Indirect Sales, e.g. Gallery representation; which is where you select or probably better yet, you are selected by a gallery to be represented. You create your artwork and then make it available to the gallery and they in turn use their connections and location to a track and obtain sales. This channel has also become available on the web, with web portal Galleries that will create your personal gallery within their gallery to help create sales.

I think that many artist perceive that a big con to selling through an established Gallery is the loss of 50% of the sales price. Trust me, there is a lot of work that is being done by a Gallery to understand the market, cultivate collectors and help with the promotion of their artists, and finally, the investments that they make just to stay in business and make a decent living. You can also spend more time creating your own artwork and less of your cash on promoting yourself.

Bottom line is that you need to decide which of these two routes you want to travel, as they are pretty much mutually exclusive. A Gallery that represents you and makes investments to promote you does not want you to be competing with them and selling directly to collectors. You may have to sell direct while becoming more established until such a time that a Gallery will decide that you could be a good artist to represent because you artwork will sell.

Best regards, Doug

ArtBiz101 – Marketing the Product

When most folks think about the Product that they are marketing, they usually thing of tangibles. Something that you can hold and feel. For an artist, a real tangible woud be an original painting or prehaps a framed and matted photograph or print. The actual image on the print may be my own creation, or perhaps I work under contract to create a specific image that a client has requested.

ArtBiz101 – Marketing Overview

When dicussing Marketing today, I am looking at from the BIG PICTURE (nice pun, eh?), that is Marketing which includes Sales and Business Development and all things that gets the product into the customers hands, or better yet, on their walls.

Basic Marketing Class can divide Marketing into its four parts, usually called the 4-P’s: Product, Place, Promotion and Price. These 4-P’s are of course interrelated, but can stand apart enought for you to focus on (Yikes, another neat pun, I’m doing good(?) today). So for today, lets get the overview of the 4-P’s. Later I will discuss each of these parts in much more detail.

Product: Simply, this is inclusive of whatever you trade for the buyers cash. The product may be a service, such as teaching art. The product may have substance that you can hold, such as photographic print (or a framed and matted print) or a book. If you have a retail gallery, the artist you represent have their artworks available for display and sell, thus the artist provides inventory. For artists, the product may be conceptual, such as a temporary gallery installation. But last, since you express yourself in your artworks, you are also a part of the product.

Place: This is inclusive of where the artwork is sold/shown and the infrasture that supports the sales process. A photographic gallery is a “brick and mortor” phyisical location in a specific location. But know the place is also the Internet, with on-line galleries, potentially yours or others. Place may also be physical location of a public gallery such as a Museum or regtional Art Center. For an artist, the placet would include your studio or where you create your artworks.

 Promotion: This is how your artwork “product” becomes known by those who you wish to purchase. The two big catagories are Direct Marketing and Indirect Marketing. An example of Direct Marketing is a display advertisement in a magazine. Being direct, it is something you pay for to get some sort of sales benefit. Perhaps it is a series of postcards of your work being mailed out regualarly to a select group of gallery owners or those who purchased your work in the past. This would also include your on-line gallery website that displays your images.

Indirect marketing has an indirect influence on a buy’s perception that you are an artist worth collecting and MAY lead to a purchase. This would include writing an article in a magzine that used your artwork as an illustration, or a magazine article about you as an artist. Another indirect marketing is being included in a group exhibit of a regional (public/non-profit) Art Center. Your work is not for sale, but the fact that you are exhibiting in a Art Center gives you visibility and credability as an artist. You can even hire a Public Relations (PR) firm or individual to help you with your indirect marketing program.

Price: Last but certainly not least, is price. This is probably the trickest part of being an artist, especially when starting out and trying to determine what your artworks can be sold for. There are two basic parts of price, which is your retail price and your wholesale price. And the price will vary depending on your product and place; such as Limited Editions/Editioning at a (for-profit) gallery, with the price varing for the product size and what part of the Edition is avalible for sales.

Best regards, Doug

ArtBiz101 – Seasonal budgeting

Maintenance Entrance (from the series: Insomnia; Hotel Noir)

I was about to move on to the topic of Marketing for the ArtBiz101 series. But while talking about retail sales recently, I realized that for perhaps a lot of artist, seasonal budgeting is a must. That is to say that during the year, you will have a really big sales periods followed by a long sales drought. That was a regular occurance with our frame/art-supply store, with the big sales periods of “back to school” and Christmas followed by Mothers Day and Fathers Day. Summer was usually very slooooow.

Some artist may see 75% of their annual sales occur over a three month time and the remining 25% over the remainder of the year. This may occur because the area you have your gallery in has a peak tourist traffic peroid, say Scottsdale, Arizona during the winter or the New Hampshire area during the intense Fall color changes.

But your costs are usually not in sync with the sales and you have operating costs that occur regualarly during the year; rent, utilities, etc. And you may have to spend a lot of money to get your pictures ready for the sales period, such that your popular images need mattes and frames and be ready to sell before the big buying season. Thus you are spending a large of amount of money before the sales, so again, the cash flow is backwards; spend money and then later get the cash back. This requires some serious cash reserves and budgeting.

For our frame/art-supply store, during that really slow period of Summer, we also had to make some really big purchases of art supplies. That was for the “back to school” sales in the Fall, when all of the new budding artist brought in their list of supplies for their new class. The same was true for purchasing all the “ready to use” picture frames in October, to stock in November and then to sell in December for Christmas.

If you spend all of your sales cash in the good times, you may be really hurting financially during the slow times.  So it helps to know what is going to be your seasonal sales cycle for your art and budget accordingly!

Best regards, Doug

ArtBiz101 – Budgeting

Double Signs (from the series Insomnia: Hotel Noir)

Budgeting and double accounting (okay not the best visual pun with this image, best I could do!) is probably the very last thing that is on the mind of a creative person, unless you are trying to “cook the books” as Enron did. As was pointed out by Martin in the comments to last weeks ArtBiz101 posting, you do need to think about things such as cash reserves for a business venture.

Developing annual budgets are not fun, but they can be helpful, perhaps essential to your business. I know what the average cash burn-rate per month is for my other business. I know that I need to make twice that amount each month to break even (tax rate is 50%, oh yuk) for business expenses, and that’s before getting paid for my personal expenses. As a result, I also know that its a good idea to have savings equal to about 3 to 6 months of the monthly expesnses. In sales, there are good months (put a little in the savings account) and bad months (Opps, take some out of the savings account). You just don’t know what’s going to happen, only what did.

For me I also try to figure when I can or should purchase some equipment, which is a different line item in the budget. I don’t buy equipment that often, so it is not a monthly expense item, but an irregular expense item. And if it is a big ticket item (say a wide format printer or a 16.7 Mp camera body), I may buy it this month, but I have to expense it (depreciate it) over the next 36 months. Unless I buy it on a credit card or take out a loan, I need that cash now.

You may also find your self needing to budget a other projects. Perhaps your are going on a two week self-assignment trip, you need to plan for the travel expenses, perhaps camera equipment rentals, film and film processing on the return.

Or in my case, I am thinking about an exhibit next year of my series Bad Trip – Sad Trip. I may be framing upword of 50 images, which at $250 per matte, glass and frame for each image, means I would need $12,500 for framing. Now hopefully it would be a local exhibit, otherwise I will need to plan for crating and shipping expenses (???). I am also thinking about larger prints and if I do those myself (buy new wide format printer) or have someone print them for me, that’s going to cost about me about $8,000. So I have a rough budget of $20,000 for the exhibit. Now lets say that I want to have a hard cover book published of this series concurrently with the exhibit, then I will need another $10,000 to $15,000. So now I should be thinking about $35,000. Oh wow.

But what would be my case if a gallery offered my a chance to exhibit and without realizing the cash needed, said yes! and later on as the exhibit date starts getting real close, I find out that I can’t afford to frame the images? Okay, the worst case is I buy some mattes and not use frames nor glass, but even thought I have the exhibit, it would not be my best foot forward & I would not be a real happy guy with this bittersweet experence.

So even if it means making some notes on a napkin, it is stil a good idea to think about this now.

Best regards, Doug